BG Mercenary mode

[Kpbendi]

Maybe it was already discussed, but I could not find any similar suggestions on the forums, so I apologize if it's a double.

BG mercenary mode, but not like on retail. The main objective is to reduce queue and even out teams as much as possible.

1. Faction would be ignored at team setup, all who sign up as mercenary would be sorted between the two teams.
2. The system would try to even out odds as much as possible: healers, tanks, ranks, classes would be considered at team setup in this priority: first even out healers, then tanks then dps by ranks and classes. (AV would not start if one of the teams has no tank and healer.)
2. No honor or reputation gain. Winner team would get money, loser team gets nothing, deserters would lose money. (Amount depends on the BG level.)
3. Non-mercenary players could join to their right faction and rank or get rep (no money reward, but deserters would still lose money). Non-mercenaries would have lower priority in queue: they join only if there's an open spot at his faction available and would not imbalance the teams. For example if there are already even number of healers in both teams, then a non-mercenary healer could not join.

If this is too complicated to develop, then randomly scattering all players between teams would be also fine, however in this case non-mercenaries could not join at all.

[Torta]

This is too complicated for me, I don't know how to do it.
Also removing competing factions from the game entirely feels really wrong.

[Roxanneflowers]

Easiest possible implementation for that would be to change battlegrounds from being Horde vs Alliance (which is faction locked for participants) ... to instead being Red vs Blue (which are faction agnostic teams).

Basic idea is that when you sign up for a battleground if you do not have Diplomacy active on your keyring you'll sign up for Red (Horde) or Blue (Alliance) sides only. But if you do have Diplomacy active on your keyring, you can sign up for Red OR Blue sides, allowing battlegrounds to fill without requiring only Horde and only Alliance teams to be filled. In other words, enable cross-faction registration for battlegrounds.

Probably a programming and UI nightmare to enable such a feature (so TOTALLY a Feature Request™) ... but that's what it boils down to, really.

[Torta]

enable cross-faction registration for battlegrounds

^ This might sound easy but it's not. Sorry, I'm just not doing it.

This suggestions is being brought up here and there since the last month but I'm really against it.
It'd destroy what's left of each faction's identities.

Regardless, it's beyond my tech. knowledge anyway.

[Kpbendi]

The point is to somehow fix WoW BG's major issue with factions: team imbalance.
When someone signs up to pug BG he has no control over the team setup, however it's a major deciding factor on who wins, sometimes more than individual effort.

So either we can treat BGs as a chess game, where each side has evenly distributed members or as a card game: everything is sorted completely random.
WoW pvp is like a rigged card game: teams are sorted somehow random, but there are factors that reduce randomness: faction imbalance, classes, roles, racials, unsymmetric BG map, etc.

Also at a given time frame people can end up in a losing wave depending who's playing at that time: if horde has twice as many healers available in the queue than alliance, then alliance will have less healers in all games regardless how many healers play in horde or alliance altogether.
This is why a small imbalance creates a self-accelerating process: if someone loses 10 games in row because of team imbalance that makes him quit, which also makes his side's odds worse, that forces more people to quit and so on. Check out Classic AV: literary nobody left to play as Alliance except afk-ers, bots and rep farmers.

So if you think the "chess style sorting" is too complicated, then even a somehow granted randomness would increase the quality of WoW BG's game experience significantly.

[Torta]

So if you think the "chess style sorting" is too complicated, then even a somehow granted randomness would increase the quality of WoW BG's game experience significantly.

Dude. When it comes to programming it is beyond my abilities. There's nothing else to discuss.

[Kazgrim]

Unrelated to suggestion, but like Torta said not every idea is feasible simply because the wow engine is limited in what we can achieve. Suggestions that largely alter base gameplay have a high chance of just not being possible, so lets not expect our ideas to somehow be able to work if Torta says she does not have the capability to do so.

This is important to keep in mind for any player when they come up with suggestions. It is fun to theorize possibilities but actual suggestions need to be considered how they would be implemented (and this requires players to really think if its possible from a scripting, game mechanic perspective). We see lots of suggestions frequently from players who would have no idea how it could be implemented but somehow think the devs would know how to get it to work. I don’t expext players to be fully knowledgable about how wow modding works, but please respect when Torta says an idea just isn’t possible or out of her scope.